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The afternoon of Nov. 1, I took one final look around my house, scanning the empty space for anything the movers might have missed. I was also saying a last goodbye to this little sanctuary that I’d created for myself in the middle of suburban Santa Cruz. I could walk to town, take a shuttle to the UC Santa Cruz campus, and yet, the neighborhood was quiet and I could occasionally hear coyotes and great horned owls at night.

I had planned to live the rest of my life in this beautiful place. But after 30 years in the Aptos hills, Bonny Doon and within the Santa Cruz city limits, I was finally pulling up my roots and moving out of state, to Corvallis, Oregon.

t’s not difficult to convey the environmental impacts of clear-cut logging; just look at the big, ugly bald patches of scarred earth after a clear-cut and you get it. But too often, an alternative to clear-cutting — known as selection logging — is offered as a panacea. Wow, it looks so much better than a clear-cut, especially when you’re looking at photos taken by timber companies doing the logging.

But if you get down into the weeds, so to speak, as forest scientists do, you start finding that selection logging also has problems…they’re just not as visible. One of the biggest problems of selection logging is the ground disturbance from the haul roads and skid trails cut into the forest to take the trees out.

Sometimes reading a science article can be downright scary. On September 5, I read a piece in the Guardian, “Plastic fibers found in tap water around the world, study reveals.” U.S. scientific researchers analyzed tap water samples from more than a dozen nations for an investigation by Orb Media (orbmedia.org), a non-profit journalism group. The Orb study, entitled “Invisibles: The plastics inside us,” concluded that billions of people on five continents are drinking water contaminated by plastic micro-particles.